Doctoral study in Fine Arts

You are able to choose from the following to complete your doctoral study, depending on your research preferences.

1. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
The traditional PhD thesis is a formal piece of advanced research, with a final examined thesis of up to 100,000 words. Your thesis serves as a contribution to the field of contemporary art research on both a local and international level. To find out more about the programme structure, entry requirements and start dates, visit Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

2. PhD including Scholarly Creative Work
You can also consider completing your PhD including Scholarly Creative Work. This allows you to submit an exhibition or performance as examinable work alongside a thesis of up to 60,000 words. There are some specific guidelines around the admission requirements relating to the amount of writing in your Master of Fine Arts (MFA), as well as the timing of the examination for creative works. Studio space may be available when relevant to the proposed project. To find out more about this option, visit PhD including Scholarly Creative Work.

3. Doctor of Fine Arts (DocFA)
The DocFA requires you to undertake a specific research project, so is a studio-dominant degree. Like the PhD, it is expected to be a contribution in its chosen field, and requires a written thesis to a maximum of 30,000 words. This allows you to work on advanced level research in a manner relevant to medium-based or post-medium practices throughout the course of the programme. Final submission can take the form of an exhibition, performance or participatory events in fine arts (approved in advance). Studio space may be available when relevant to the proposed project. To find out more about the programme structure, entry requirements and start dates, visit Doctor of Fine Arts (DocFA).

We understand that supervisor quality and a strong candidate-supervisor relationship are very important when you decide where to undertake your doctoral study. Our staff are internationally recognised artists, makers and researchers.

Jon Bywater

Jon is a Pākehā critic who writes about art and music with a particular interest in politics and place. His writing has addressed contemporary art in a broad range of media and artistic modes appearing in journals including Afterall, art-agenda, Artforum, Art New Zealand, Contemporary​​ HUM, Frieze and Reading Room, and several monographs and exhibition catalogues.

Research areas

• Contemporary art
• Art criticism
• Artist-run initiatives
• Large-scale periodic exhibitions
• Art identified with Aotearoa New Zealand in a globalising art world
• Tino rangatiratanga / Indigenous sovereignty
• Theory for creative practice

Find out more: Jon Bywater
Contact Jon: j.bywater@auckland.ac.nz

James Cousins

James works to prise open new sets of critical possibilities for painting. Unique to his approach is a practice that builds upon processes connected to post-minimalism and contemporary painting, mapping a convergence of figurative and abstract modes of representation.

Recent ideas exploring forming of painting as a space of transmission have opened new terrains - spaces that seek to demonstrate a new phenomenology of information transfer via a re-enactment and relocation of recycled images in different places and times.

Research areas

• Contemporary art
• Painting
• Art theory

Find out more: James Cousins
Contact James: j.cousins@auckland.ac.nz

Lisa Crowley

Lisa is a lecturer whose practice concentrates on both photography and moving image. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Lisa’s practice draws on diverse lineages of feminist practice. These different strands of thought, spanning the scientific, the mystic and the creative, share an understanding of the natural world through embodied and speculative orientations.

Research areas

• Photography
• Film
• Video
• Installation
• Feminist new materialisms
• Analogue/film-based materialities and their relationship to materialist subjectivities

Find out more: Lisa Crowley
Contact Lisa: l.crowley@auckland.ac.nz

Associate Professor Gavin Hipkins

Gavin has exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally over the last two decades, working primarily in expanded photographic series.

Research areas

• Contemporary fine arts
• Photography and experimental film, including landscape traditions and postcolonial theory
• Digital montage and discourses of hybridity
• Photo and filmic experimental narrative structures

Find out more: Associate Professor Gavin Hipkins
Contact Gavin: g.hipkins@auckland.ac.nz

Dr Lucille Holmes

Lucille Holmes, PhD, is a cultural theorist, writer, psychoanalyst and senior lecturer with long-term experience in doctoral supervision. She currently supervises PhD and Doctor of Fine Arts projects in a diverse range of artistic and theoretical frameworks.

Research areas

• Artistic research
• Relationships of ethics and aesthetics
• Applications of psychoanalytic theory to visual art practices

Find out more: Dr Lucille Holmes
Contact Lucille: la.holmes@auckland.ac.nz
 

Dr Simon Ingram

Simon has developed a way to build on and collaborate with abstract problems inherent to both painting history and science's attempts to plot living systems and cosmic radiation.

More recently he has extended this by disrupting the technical-aesthetic framework central to his approach.

Research areas

• Abstract art
• Painting
• Conceptual art
• Electronic art
• Systems art
• Radio astronomy
• Ecoacoustics
• Regenerative practices
• Environmental monitoring
• Machine learning
• Robotics

Find out more: Dr Simon Ingram
Contact Simon: s.ingram@auckland.ac.nz

Associate Professor Sean Kerr

Sean Kerr is a practising artist specialising in real-time 3D, VR and interactive technologies. Sean has produced two books: Bruce is in the Garden, So Someone is in the Garden, and Pop. Both were published by Clouds publishing.

Research areas

• Investigating the emerging area of new media technologies from the perspective of their interactive potential
• Creative practice projects, including real-time 3D, VR, MR and AR, physical computing, internet art, installation and sonic works. These projects pursue interactive relationships that occur as audience, artist, and technology interfaced in a complex dynamic.

Find out more: Associate Professor Sean Kerr
Contact Sean: s.kerr@auckland.ac.nz

Associate Professor Alex Monteith

Alex Monteith is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and Associate Professor whose practice intersects environmental activism, oceanic geographies, and contemporary art.

Research areas

• Aotearoa surfing culture
• Acrobatic/stunt flight
• Helicopter alpine search and rescue flight
• Motorcycle culture

Performance art issues are explored in relationship to contemporary cultural activities that are radically sensitive to geography. Within adrenalin and speed sports genres, relationships of technology to the body, technology to territory and action to site are explored, including implications of on-board video culture.

Find out more: Associate Professor Alex Monteith
Contact Alex: al.monteith@auckland.ac.nz

Associate Professor Peter Robinson

Peter is an internationally acclaimed artist whose research interests include installation, sculpture, painting and art education theory and practice.

His recent work investigates both the materiality and metaphoric potential of his chosen medium. Whether it is the massive weightless volume of polystyrene forms or the densely contracted materiality of felt, Peter's sculptural propositions play out various oppositions such as density and lightness, dispersion and compression.

Find out more: Associate Professor Peter Robinson
Contact Peter: p.robinson@auckland.ac.nz

Associate Professor Peter Shand

Peter is an associate professor in Fine Arts. He has wide experience in public service in the creative sector as well as a long-standing record of publication and curation in his areas of research.

Research areas

• Contemporary art
• Contemporary fashion theory
• Art and law
• Cultural heritage
• Copyright

Find out more: Associate Professor Peter Shand
Contact Peter: p.shand@auckland.ac.nz

Jim Speers

Jim's work involves documentary filmmaking. Most recently Jim directed a documentary focused on rural Japan. Through his Field Recordings project, Jim has also worked with a collective of Chinese and New Zealand artists who produce Chinese language documentary artworks which are exhibited internationally. Jim's ongoing interest lies in the presentation of culture within everyday life, and the difficulties generated by cross-cultural communication.

Research areas

• Documentary filmmaking
• Sculpture and installation

Find out more: Jim Speers
Contact Jim: j.speers@auckland.ac.nz

Dr Ruth Watson

Ruth Watson’s research focuses on the relations of place and representation, especially the image of the world as constructed by cartography.

Research areas

• Video installation
• Sculpture
• Painting
• History of cartography relating to cordiform maps of the 16th century

Find out more: Dr Ruth Watson
Contact Ruth: r.watson@auckland.ac.nz

Tara Winters

Tara has a background in graphic design and has worked as a freelance designer for many years in the areas of print and interactive media. Tara's work takes a critical gaze over the various forms of teaching and learning practices occurring in contemporary art and design education. Recent work includes the development of a structure for facilitating meta-learning in art and design education, and a system for helping international students in the creative arts with orienting to a new academic context.

Research areas

• Fluid and dynamic forms of representation offered by digital technologies
• Art and design pedagogy

Find out more: Tara Winters
Contact Tara: t.winters@auckland.ac.nz

'Translation in the Language of Sculpture' | Supervised by Associate Professor Sean Kerr and Dr Lucille Holmes

'Symptoms in Silico : Psychoanalysis and Generative Computer Art' | Supervised by Dr Lucille Holmes and Dr Simon Ingram

'In Praise of the Nondual in Painting' | Supervised by Dr Lucille Holmes and James Cousins

'Lines of Sight: Being and Making With Place' | Supervised by Lisa Crowley and Jon Bywater

There are several scholarships you may be eligible for when you decide to pursue doctoral studies in Fine Arts:

• University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarships